All Chapters of Craved By My Fiance's Brother: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

Because somewhere deep down in the quietest corner of my heart, a stupid, foolish little part of me had always held onto the hope that if I ever truly needed her, she would choose me over the money. But today proved I’ve been waiting for a fantasy.I take a ragged breath. “I know you’re angry.”“You should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself,” she snarls.I stare right back at her, but the words don't sting anymore. The armor is finally up. I’ve heard too many of her insults over the years for them to draw blood anymore.“I’m not,” I say softly.Her brows knot together. “What?”“I’m not ashamed.” I turn my eyes toward the grand staircase. “I am terrified. I’m confused as hell. And I have absolutely no clue what happens tomorrow.” I look back at her one last time. “But I am not ashamed.”Her lips part, but I cut her off before she can spit out another word.“I spent my entire life doing everything expected of me,” I say, swallowing hard. “I’m done.”“Meeka—”“Stop interrupting me, Mom! I

It definitely didn't happen overnight. At first, I was a complete mess. I stayed buried in my tiny apartment for a week straight, ignoring the barrage of texts, keeping my phone switched off for hours at a time, and refusing to give anyone the big dramatic explanation they felt entitled to. I just stopped explaining myself. Period.And then, when the background noise of everyone else's opinions finally faded away, I pulled out that beaten-up sketchbook I’d hidden in the bottom drawer for years.I picked up a pencil. One drawing led to three. Three led to a whole folder. That folder turned into a crazy, reckless concept. The concept turned into a business plan. And that business plan became the room I'm standing in right now.God, the sheer amount of crap I had to figure out on the fly was absurd. Sourcing fabric suppliers who wouldn't rip off a newcomer. Figuring out commercial leases. Hiring people who actually knew how to construct a garment, branding, payroll, inventory. A million

He doesn't offer a polite smile, nor does he look shocked to see me standing there in the spotlight. He just holds my gaze for a long, heavy moment before his eyes slowly drift away, taking in the rest of the studio.He looks at the display racks I spent weeks organizing. He looks at the mood boards framed on the brick wall. He watches a guest laugh while holding up one of my jackets against her shoulders.And as he takes it all in, something subtle shifts around his jaw and his eyes.Pride.God, I hate how much that hurts. It hits harder than if he’d looked at me with cold indifference. Because Slade actually knows. He was one of the very few people who saw me sitting on the floor of my apartment very late in the night, surrounded by paper scraps and crying over ruined thread tension, desperate to make this happen. He knew what this meant to me before there was a studio, before there were employees, before any of this was real.He knew the dream when it was just a pathetic, terrifyin

SLADE'S POV::For the better part of the last two months, New York has just been a skyline I left in the rearview mirror.Business, mostly. The kind of grinding, endless corporate expansion that sucks the oxygen out of every room you walk into. My company has been pushing hard into new regional markets, and a dozen high-stakes operational choices demanded my literal, physical presence. Between high-pressure negotiations with stubborn new partners, grueling factory floor inspections, and back-to-back boardroom meetings that felt engineered to consume every waking hour of my existence, I’ve logged more miles in cramped airplanes and hotel rooms than I care to admit.It is exhausting. Relentlessly, bone-deep exhausting. But it’s productive, too.And, if I'm being brutally honest with myself, the physical distance has done me some good. Not because being hundreds of miles away somehow managed to magic Meeka out of my head. That would be a completely ridiculous expectation, considering I

My gaze snaps back to her just as she begins to turn on her heel toward the main entrance. And that is the exact millisecond she sees me.There is no guessing when it happens. I can track the exact shift in the air.Her welcoming smile falters and stalls midway across her face. Her slender fingers tighten instinctively around the ceramic cup she's holding, and for one suspended, breathless second, she looks as though she's completely forgotten how to breathe, let alone what she was about to say to the person standing next to her.The low ambient roar of the party continues to swirl around us, as our eyes lock across the crowded room, but to my ears, it drops to a dead, absolute hush.Now there is the woman I have spent the last countless agonizing days trying desperately not to reach for. The woman whose lingering absence has haunted me into every empty hotel suite, every late-night strategy session, and every cold morning when I woke up with the phantom urge to tell her something fun